iMac slowing down

A lot depends on what is causing the slow down. A few questions:


1. When did it start slowing down? Was it gradual, or did it happen after a specific event?

2. Despite what is often spouted out, Mac hard drives can in some circumstances become fragmented. There are tools that can do an OK job, but the only way to do it properly is to boot from an external drive and then defragment the imac's boot disk. Make sure you take a clone of the disk first! Carbon Copy Cloner is good for this.

3. Run Activity Monitor and see if you are running out of physical memory (RAM). If so, get over to crucial.com/uk

4. Repair Permissions using Disk Utility

5. Make urge OS X is up-to-date.
 
Could be short of memory. If you use Firefox then that's a bloated memory sucking pig. It needs restarting regularly. I use Istat menus to find out what is going on. It sits on top toolbar so you can see at a glance how much memory is in use and how hot it is getting.
 
Get a pc... Ha no I joke, before I get flame grilled..

Defragging shouldn't occur on a journaled file system, if its set to hfs+.

As above I'd check your memory usage as a starter for 10. It wouldn't be completely unheard of to need a reinstall if you're installing and uninstalling crap regularly.
 
Try setting up a new user on the machine, logging in as the new user and see how fast that is. In my experience most slowdowns and problems are due to the User setup being bloated, updated from an older system version, full of out-of-date cruft, etc, etc

Nick Froome
 
arad85 said:
But Macs don't slow down - or so I'm told :rolleyes: ;)
Click to expand...

neil_g said:
Well no that is a fib but we won't go there :)
Click to expand...

Sarky buggers!

Is your hard drive almost full? I noticed the performance of my old stuffed iMac improved after clearing out unused stuff. I guess OSX still uses a form of Pagefile that needs a space to operate.
 
It started slowing down more recently I think but slightly gradual. The sound keeps cutting out as if its a radio station out of tune at random times. This started since getting mountain lion but when it happens its a bit laggy overall.

Loads of space on hard drive. 500gb I think.

I'm not very technical with these things so would prefer not to wipe!

When I look in activity monitor there's about a gb of ram/memory in "idle". Don't know what this means? I can have 500mb "free" but still slow-ish.
 
You could try using Onyx for Mac OSX. Its a free download and will help to maintain your Mac and keep it running well.
Other than a complete reinstall ( which speeded my iMac up a lot) you could check if you are using the maximum amount of memory for your machine. Its cheap enough to buy now and very easy to fit.
Also, to check the memory is being recognised, click on the black apple logo ( top left of your screen) and select 'about this mac'. it will report the memory you have installed. Make sure it tallies with what you actually have.
Allan
 
allanm said:
You could try using Onyx for Mac OSX. Its a free download and will help to maintain your Mac and keep it running well.
Other than a complete reinstall ( which speeded my iMac up a lot) you could check if you are using the maximum amount of memory for your machine. Its cheap enough to buy now and very easy to fit.
Also, to check the memory is being recognised, click on the black apple logo ( top left of your screen) and select 'about this mac'. it will report the memory you have installed. Make sure it tallies with what you actually have.
Allan
Click to expand...

Thanks for this.

How do you add memory to an iMac and what memory should I get? It's a 27 inch i5 3.1ghz.
I can't see how you'd open it to put it in?
 
Hmm. Is it still under applecare? It shouldn't have sound issues.

Also dust the rear air intake and make sure there aren't loads of dust bunnies on the air intake on the under side. My g5 slowed down and then wouldn't start. Then I dusted it and it was a lot better...
 
WillNicholls said:
How do you add memory to an iMac
Click to expand...

At the bottom underneath the screen, you'll see a small panel with a couple of screws holding it in. You unscrew these and the memory sticks are behind this panel. They just pull out with the help of a small plastic strip that you just pull. The new memory stick simple plug back in. Done and dusted in 2 mins. :thumbs:
 
As noted above, I'd check first for how much swap space you're using. In Activity Monitor, see what figure is by "Swap used" - in a perfect world, it'd be zero or 64MB, but you might be using a few GB.

You can find out the maximum RAM that can be fitted to a specific model over here, which lists the full specs for every iMac. Also note this list, which is occasionally different, listing the actual maximum, rather than the official maximum - once in a while, they're different.

Depending on how much storage you use, you might also look into replacing the hard drive with an SSD - they're still more expensive than HDs, but vastly faster, both in transfer speed, and the zero seek time. Even mundane tasks like web browsing become noticeably faster, as there's no head having to zip in and out, and waiting for a platter to spin around to the right spot. (If you need a lot of capacity, and don't use the optical drive, you could replace the optical drive with an SSD instead - best of both worlds!)
 
neil_g said:
Defragging shouldn't occur on a journaled file system, if its set to hfs+.

.
Click to expand...

Shouldn't being the operative word :-)

After many months of installing, uninstalling, OS updates, saves, deletes (especially large files), a Mac will suffer fragmentation, maybe not as bad as pre Vista Windows PC's, but fragmentation can easily occur.

Remember when you first unpacked your Mac and you were blown away at how quickly Photoshop etc opened, only to find that it takes 10 or 20 seconds now?

One of our iMacs (used for audio and video editing) started to really slow down. Turned out that the drive was over 55% fragmented! After cloning, then defragmenting, started running like lightning. Remember, if you have lots of files (video, large photos etc) that are deleted after you install new programs or updates (including the ever increasing in size Apple updates), that space is not always immediately reclaimed. This then means that the read/write head of your hard drive has to work overtime by reading from the outside (faster) and then jumping to the inside (slower) of the disk platter.
 
Last edited:
Well no it "shouldn't"


Shamelessly stolen:

On-the-fly Defragmentation
When a file is opened on an HFS+ volume, the following conditions are tested:

If the file is less than 20 MB in size
If the file is not already busy
If the file is not read-only
If the file has more than eight extents
If the system has been up for at least three minutes
If all of the above conditions are satisfied, the file is relocated -- it is defragmented on-the-fly.
 
How much RAM does it have? Anything less than 4GB and it is inadequate, ideally needs 8+

Get 'Free memory' app to control RAM usage as for some reason apple thinks that we need to store all inactive memory (previously open apps) instead of making it available for running ones.
 
daugirdas said:
How much RAM does it have? Anything less than 4GB and it is inadequate, ideally needs 8+

Get 'Free memory' app to control RAM usage as for some reason apple thinks that we need to store all inactive memory (previously open apps) instead of making it available for running ones.
Click to expand...

It has 4GB.
 
If you think that RAM is the issue after checking something like iStat, I'd be inclined to use the Crucial UK system checker to ensure I was buying the right memory - it'll tell you how many slots you have and how many free. I think 4Gb is minimal, the more you get would not hurt, especially for video.

The amount of memory you buy will not affect the sound issue you previously spoke about.
 
Tulipone said:
If you think that RAM is the issue after checking something like iStat, I'd be inclined to use the Crucial UK system checker to ensure I was buying the right memory - it'll tell you how many slots you have and how many free. I think 4Gb is minimal, the more you get would not hurt, especially for video.

The amount of memory you buy will not affect the sound issue you previously spoke about.
Click to expand...

Thanks - no I am aware, this is just a separate issue. :D
 
I get crucial memory. It's always been very good. 4gb is miniscule amount of RAM these days. Go straight to whatever the max is for the machine as you can't have too much memory when you are video editing.
 
WillNicholls said:
Yes I still have Apple Care.

How can they fix it though unless they know of the problem?
Click to expand...

Well, before you upgrade the RAM yourself, if you explain you have performance problems they'll give it a a once over.

Heard on various accounts of people making the most of AppleCare - replacing batteries, screens, hardware etc.

Give them a call
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top